by Paul Taylor
Shade made Ben take an overly circuitous route to reach the Motel. Apparently so he could suss out the rest of the town, see if they were holed up anywhere else. After a half hour of doing "blockies", Ben pulled to a stop in front of the Public Baths, on the opposite side of the road from the motel.
"Funny how we missed that," Ben said, looking at it. "Probably because of what a huge town Casino is, I guess."
Shade grunted noncommittally, caught short for a witty reply. "They must have been blocking me somehow."
"Man, I hate when people do that to me."
Ben was being a smart-arse, but it was weird that they'd missed the Motel. Two, maybe three dozen cars surrounded it, pulled up all along the street, some up on the footpath. Others sat right out in the middle of the street. The motel itself looked odd, but Ben couldn't quite put his finger on why until Shade pointed it out. If you looked at it just right, the entire exterior of the Motel appeared to be enclosed in a faint, vaporous black cloud. Shade assured him these were shadows wrapping the building and that what Ben was seeing was probably only a faint echo of what was there.
"It's crawling with them," Shade whispered. "Damn place is like a nest full of snakes. Where are you going?" Ben was opening the car door.
"I'm gonna rescue my fucking girlfriend," he said. "Isn't that the whole reason we're here?"
"Not yet," said Shade. He put a hand on Ben's arm that, while light, was very restraining. "We're hardly going to charge into the viper's nest in broad daylight now, are we? We'll wait until night and then we'll decide the best way to approach this."
"Until night?" said Ben. Was he kidding? "Hang on, didn't you say the Shadows are at their strongest as night?" In fact, Ben remembered him saying no such thing but he desperately wanted to get in there as soon as humanly possible to rescue Kath. He'd been suffering all sorts of unsettling visions of Kath and Neil's reunion and was quite prepared to play the heroic boyfriend, snatching her from disaster at the last possible second.
Shade looked at Ben, his eyebrows raised over the top of his sunglasses. "I don't recall ever saying that," he said. Ben thought it prudent to keep his mouth shut and after a moment, Shade went on. "They're not vampires, they gain strength during the day because that's when their shadows are most focussed. At night their shadows are like ghosts, amorphous, shapeless. Which is where our spotlight comes in."
"Please enlighten me, Professor Shade." This was what Ben had been itching to find out. How the strobe lights played into the game.
"The shadows have no defined shape at night, they're ephemeral and hazy. The sudden shock of flashing a searing white light on them will kill them. It's like a concentrated lighting storm. The constant snapping into a defined shape is too much and they die."
Ben mused on this for a moment, savouring it, before he asked the most important question. "What happens to the host?"
Shade hesitated. "It's not pretty."
A grim, corpse-like smile stretched Ben's face. "Excellent." Ben could almost taste the pain he would finally be able to inflict back upon Neil. "Tell me it's excruciatingly painful."
"It's excruciatingly painful," said Shade. "So painful, in fact, that the host usually dies from shock."
"Usually?"
"Yeah. I've used it a couple of times over the years. Probably nine out of ten times, the host has died. I imagine it feels something similar to having all your insides torn out by charged electrical wire."
Ben liked the sound of that.
Night came down slowly, far too slowly for Ben's liking, he was itching to see some action, to take out some of the pent-up frustration he'd amassed over the last ten years.
"So what's your plan?" Ben asked as they pulled up, back at the motel after a day of hiding out around town.
"Plan?" said Shade. "What plan? You were running the plan, weren't you?"
Shade smiled lopsidedly and Ben realised he was taking the piss. An event that was, unfortunately, not as rare as Ben would like where the man who was supposed to save the world was concerned.
"Funny man," Ben told him. "So we just burst in there gangbusters and start flashing the lights around?"
Shade nodded. "Pretty much. I'm not game to risk anything more complex than that, are you?"
Ben hedged. "Well, you know, I would, but you're the expert so..." he shrugged, peering at Shade through the gloom of the car, trying to ascertain his reaction.
"You notice that?" said Shade, leaning forward to look up through the windscreen.
"What's that?" asked Ben. He leant forward, expecting to see some vast shape moving across the sky, or something wrong with the stars.
"You notice anything missing?" Shade asked him. "Anything odd about the shops?"
There were only two shops that Ben could really see from where they sat, the chicken place right beside them and the Ampol on the opposite corner. It's sign towered, looming and dark, over the street.
"They're all dark," said Ben, feeling somewhat stupid for not having noticed it himself. "There's no power?"
"And Bingo was his name-o," said Shade. "The Shadoweaters probably cut it off because they think it gives them an advantage. Idiots."
"Well, it will make it easier for them to hide from us," Ben pointed out.
"Ye-es," said Shade slowly. "But it'll make the strobe that much more effective."
"Well, yeah. Duh."
"Come on," said Shade. Before Ben even moved, Shade was outside and slinking around to the back of the car with that snake on legs walk of his.
"Use them sparingly," he told Ben, as he handed him one of the strobe lights. "I've got spare batteries but you don't want to be fucking around trying to change batteries with a Shadoweater about to shadow you."
They looked up the street at the vast bulk of the Motel, twitching with sheets of shadow in the darkness. This was to be it, then. They were going in and Ben was going to rescue the girl he loved.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE